This post is part of our feature on Money Losers of 2008. See all 20.

Our series of Money Losers for 2008 has its share of millionaires and billionaires on it. Personally, I think that is just wrong. While these people may have lost billions of dollars this past year, it doesn't seem fair to call them money losers. They will certainly survive this troubled time and still have their house, their cars, and (at least some of) their fortune. However, on the flip side, no one would read an article about Frank the farmer from Iowa who lost 50% of his life savings.

Kirk Kerkorian made his fortune by developing real estate and hotels in Las Vegas and by buying and selling movie studio MGM three times over. According to the Forbes 2008 list, he is the world's 41st-richest person with a net worth of $16.0 billion.

This year has seen some bumps in the road for Mr. Kerkorian. His private investment corporation Tracinda owns about 55% of MGM Mirage (NYSE: MGM) and made a very prominent bad call on Ford (NYSE: F) earlier this year.

MGM peaked around October of last year with a stock price upwards of $95. At that time, Tracinda's 55% state would have been worth about $14.5 billion. However, with today's share price of just $13.50, that chunk of MGM is "only" $1.5 billion. Of course these are only paper gains and paper losses at this point, but it still stings a little bit to look at the bottom line.

This post is part of our feature on Money Losers of 2008. See all 20.

Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson's fortune has fallen $24 billion since the beginning of 2008 as shares of his Las Vegas Sands (NYSE: LVS) have dropped 95% during the year as cost-conscious consumers stay away from luxury casinos. (His fortune has dropped even further over the past two months.)

Adelson is a colorful character, who was a consulting client of mine in the 1980s. A brash guy from the streets of Dorchester -- a tough section of Boston -- Adelson first hit it big by creating Las Vegas-based COMDEX -- what was the biggest high-tech trade show around through much of the 1980s and 1990s.

Even though COMDEX faded from prominence since then, Adelson fell in love with Las Vegas and borrowed heavily to get into the casino business. Now his company holds $10.2 billion of debt on a $2.2 billion sliver of equity, and it lost $52 million over the first nine months of the year.

With the economy tanking and credit markets skittish, it could be hard for Adelson to recover. But he's been in tougher scrapes before.

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. Portfolio will publish his book about Boeing, You Can't Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing, on December 26, 2008. He has no financial interest in Las Vegas Sands securities.

Be sure to check out more Money Losers of 2008.

This post is part of our feature on Money Losers of 2008. See all 20.

For a second year in a row, American homeowners are among the biggest losers of 2008. In 2007, predictions were that American homeowners would lose over $103 billion. Now at the end of 2008 the number jumped to losses of $2 trillion as the value of homes continue to fall with no end in sight. As job losses increase, even more families will be forced into foreclosure.

Homeowners who bought at the top of the housing bubble between 2005 and 2006, could wait decades for the prices to reach that level again. People who must move for a new job or family crisis find they either have to come up with cash for closing (if they find a willing buyer) or they must walk away from the loan and give the house back to the bank either through foreclosure or through a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure.

The housing bubble that started to inflate in 2002 and burst in 2007 drove housing prices way out of the normal range. The normal ranges for housing prices track these measures:

• Income: The house price should not exceed three times your average household income, which was true from 1950 to 2000. In 2006 the average household income was $66,600, so the average home price should have been about $200,000. But during that year the average home price was about $300,000.

This post is part of our feature on Money Losers of 2008. See all 20.

If there could be a more cruel joke played on the downtrodden American middle class this year, I don't know what it could be. Battered by high gas prices and a punishing mortgage climate in which millions lost their homes, at the end of the year, many were laid off. Desperate in a period of high unemployment, millions are turning to their 401(k) plan for emergency funds. And that's where the true emergency is.

My 401(k) lost about 40% of its value in only a few terrible months this summer and fall. I didn't have much to lose; I'm only a drop in a trillion-dollar bucket, with losses in the NYSE alone at $8.6 trillion for the year. In January 2008, the NYSE opened at 9,647 points, a value of $19.7 trillion. By mid-December, the NYSE was hovering around 5,500 points, a value of $11.1 trillion, an enormous 43.7% decline.

Taking an early distribution from my 401(k) due to a period of depressed income (I'm now a freelance writer and not an "employee," a title so imbued with special status in our society), I had to laugh at the automatic calculator that the Fidelity Net Benefits system makes you undergo in order to request a distribution, showing me how much I would be losing from my retirement income. If only someone could have made me go through this little exercise when I was responsibly socking away cash in stock index funds -- "this is how much retirement money you can lose if you trust in the American economy!" -- perhaps I'd have saved the time to log into Fidelity and just stuck the money in savings instead. I had to laugh -- so I didn't cry.

This post is part of our feature on Money Losers of 2008. See all 20.

Back in the early 2000s, Spitzer was the champion of investors battling evil on Wall Street, and he was much more aggressive than the SEC. The SEC finally got mad and asked that Spitzer coordinate his efforts with them. I doubt many of the investigations that Spitzer led in the early 2000s would ever have happened if he waited around for the SEC to act. He was even named "Crusader of the Year" in 2002 by Time magazine.

Spitzer used the points he won as a popular New York State Attorney General to win the governor's race, but things quickly went downhill. First there was the scandal involving his aides who attempted to embarrass Republican state Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno because of the use of state aircraft. Then Spitzer lost more popularity when he made it easier for illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses.

But being named as Client 9 in a prostitution ring took him down. Investigators found out about the ring when they followed the money after seeing funds moving from his accounts in a suspicious manner. In the end it was reported that Spitzer spent $80,000 on prostitutes. A measly sum when you consider the other money losers in this year's nominations. But for Spitzer it's more about losing power than losing money.

Sadly, he proved his own words to the BBC is 2006, "Everyone is susceptible to the notion that when you begin to do well, you begin to see no boundary lines and forget the rules apply."

Be sure to check out more Money Losers of 2008.